Pory's perfectly fine currently so long as you get a Brightdarken. It makes the character absolutely insane and forces the team to at least focus you twice in a battle, or else lose the battle and possibly their base.

If Anti was hard to stop, with a Brightdarken it'd simply be even worse. At the moment, it feels perfectly acceptable.

I don't know where people are getting off saying mana orbs are rarely bought. I buy them on mostly every hero, especially if I go mid. They're great for staying power and for prolonged fights. You're not always fighting close to a fountain.

After playing Blood Mage some more I can definitely say that him being useless against other heroes is bullshit. As long as you get some spell-boosting items and use your blood bath often enough (it's especially easy to fill on the bloodmage) you'll be taking big chunks out of the enemy.

Because Pain Ward is no longer affected by spells, I think its HP should be brought down from 200/300/400/500/600 to 100/150/200/250/300. Also, towers don't attack wards, even if they're the only enemy available to target.

If fire fighters fight fires and crime fighters fight crime, then what do freedom fighters fight?

Some things people are going way overboard on here. Remember a heroes playing style when suggesting things.

Some heroes aren't meant to be domineering head to head, while others are tailored for burst dmg and others for crowd control and so forth. I think heroes as they are, until all small unintentional bugs that affect gameplay are fixed, fine as they are. Lots of reasons some things seem balance or imbalanced (for instance, wards) is due to the fact that there are some game mechanics which are not working as intended (wards can be affected my spells so having 600 hp isn't making them too strong, as lots of spells can easily destroy them).

Pory's another thing. Her ult is fine atm BECAUSE it hits towers too, AND it deals a shitload of dmg. If you combine her ult with something like blueshift, then it's hilarious how ugly it gets for the other team. Just because on her own it seems like her ult can be cancelled too easily, just means you need to coordinate your team efforts better, or change your use of the ultimate.

Drain_Pipe wrote:Just because on her own it seems like her ult can be cancelled too easily, just means you need to coordinate your team efforts better, or change your use of the ultimate.

I always found this to be the ultimate draw ToB had over other maps: teamwork. In DoTA one guy can demolish the other team but that was never the case in ToB, you always had to work together. Leto's ultimate would never kill anything on its own because anyone with half a brain would just walk out of it, you needed another hero like Sashi to stun, then Leto ulti them catching 2 or maybe even three heroes in it for the whole duration. This needs to be kept in mind when suggesting balance changes because in my opinion it was the whole point of why ToB was awesome and DoTA could go to hell.

I know a lot of the items are only placeholders to test out/show new mechanics like spell deflection and stuff, but most of them are workable as is.

One of the things people have been complaining about is the redundancy of physical attacks at higher levels when everyone is spamming nukes. I think a part of the problem is that the items that grant damage are few and grant very small bonuses. The longsword, for instance, grants +6 damage which is a very small bonus and people almost never take it except when the circlet and longsword are on cooldown. Upping that to +9 or +10 damage would make it a much more viable option.

I also think all of the high cost weapons like the witch hammer, spellblade and hushblade should add a bonus to damage, ranging from around 10-20. Their primary effects shouldn't be the only thing for making such an investment. Mirror shields and the other defensive items could also get an armor bonus.

An idea we had a few nights ago was adding an item called the wrecking ball, which would grant you bonus damage against buildings. It could be a pretty cool investment for physical heroes that want to siege better.

Then there are a few items that are rarely bought but have a lot of potential, like the bloodletter, the battle standard and the mutant rabbit foot. I don't think there's anything wrong with these items, they just need a boost. Give the bloodletter an increase in damage and up the bonus from 10% to about 15-20%. The mutant rabbit foot could use some damage as well, or an increase in the extra gold.

One last thing. Item cooldowns, are they necessary? They're mostly just annoying, especially at the beginning when everyone and their mother wants to get their boots of speed.

I think that instead of the + dmg or armor, we should have items that give % resistance that stack for both physical and magical spells. By that, i mean add an orb that gives + physical dmg %, add an orb that gives + magical resistance %, and make the armor orb, instead resist % physical dmg. Also, some spells should deal physical dmg, instead of magical (ie cleaver or hook). These would damage but suffer armor reduction and physical spell dmg resistance as well.

As for items dealing bonus dmg, I'd rather if it were specific types of units then. Ie, like your wrecking ball item, we'd have something like "no more heroes" which deals decent bonus physical damage to heroes only, as well as having one for spawns/summons. This allows us get rid of the heroes who stack all pure dmg and become equally good vs spawns, towers AND heroes.

Last thing:

Suggestion for PW to beef up its power late game and reduce its spawn owning capabilities. Split the dps into a small amount of stock dmg as well as a % of the unit's hp. Ie: 10/15/20/25/30 + 2/3/4/5/6% hp damaged per second. The number can be tweaked, but in all honesty, the % based dmg is peanuts on spawns while decent vs heroes. At the same time, stock dmg is very low to heroes while decent vs spawns. Reasoning behind this: Spawns don't get stronger, heroes do.

Cass, if you're expecting this place to become some sort of uber-mega revival, then I would be forced to assume you are somewhat delusional. War3 just doesn't have enough players these days. However, we've recently been getting alot of pubs. The biggest problem now is that some hosts are blatant pussies with no patience.

Um, you seem to have misunderstood my comment that I'd add new content if there were a thousand games a day. That comment didn't mean "I want more people to play." It meant "I'm not going to add new content." The only reason I released O at all was to get erwt and Chriz's work out there. As long as those guys can put it on their resumes and direct people here to check it out, I don't care how many people play it.

Then again, adding new content might bring us some new players too, no?

Also it would be kinda sad if none of those cool ideas you had would ever see daylight. ( For example: ever since I saw that Deaods shadow capturing system, and scripted image healthbar thingies, Ive been waiting to see some damn cool See No Evil spell, that makes the Hero completely visually invisible for the owner of the target.. I mean, damn that would be awesome. )

Anyways, Im glad you released O, even if you are not gonna continue it. Its damn awesome.

Cassiel wrote:Um, you seem to have misunderstood my comment that I'd add new content if there were a thousand games a day. That comment didn't mean "I want more people to play." It meant "I'm not going to add new content." The only reason I released O at all was to get erwt and Chriz's work out there. As long as those guys can put it on their resumes and direct people here to check it out, I don't care how many people play it.

Viikuna- wrote:Also it would be kinda sad if none of those cool ideas you had would ever see daylight. ( For example: ever since I saw that Deaods shadow capturing system, and scripted image healthbar thingies, Ive been waiting to see some damn cool See No Evil spell, that makes the Hero completely visually invisible for the owner of the target.. I mean, damn that would be awesome. )

I wouldn't mess with shadows if I were you. In an actual playable map where lots of things are going on, it's incredibly buggy and prone to crashes. I discovered the shadow trick back when I rewrote Mike's textsplat library for the hero selection screen, which does a lot of creating and destroying of images. There were all kinds of side effects, like deleting the shadows of every unit in the game, random crashes when units switched terrain types and had their shadows recreated, etc.

Cassiel wrote:Um, you seem to have misunderstood my comment that I'd add new content if there were a thousand games a day. That comment didn't mean "I want more people to play." It meant "I'm not going to add new content." The only reason I released O at all was to get erwt and Chriz's work out there. As long as those guys can put it on their resumes and direct people here to check it out, I don't care how many people play it.

That statement confuses me, because why would you put so much effort into this and try to make it perfect just to showcase erwt's and chriz' modeling and artwork? I'd have assumed you'd want to fix everything up for the sake of finishing off this project. I thought that was why we were spending all this time to give feedback and find bugs for you.

You report bugs and give feedback on balance so you can have a balanced and bug-free version of the map to play. I continue to update it with these limited goals in mind because that's what releasing it means.